John Maytham's Book Review: 21 January 2022

Listen to John Maytham's three book picks for the week.

• Thriller: The Lonely Ones by Hakan Nesser

• Fiction: Snow Country by Sebastian Faulks

• Non-fiction: How to be a Refugee: One family story of exile and belonging

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The Lonely Ones begins in 1969 when six young people arrive in the Swedish university town of Uppsala, Over the course of a few years they become close friends, but something happens and changes everything for the group during a trip to Eastern Europe.

Several years later, a university lecturer is found dead at the bottom of a cliff in the woods, and it mysteriously happens to be the exact same spot where one of the Uppsala students died many years before.

Detective Inspector Gunnar Barbarotti takes on the case with the hopes of getting to the bottom of the mysterious deaths.

It's thicker than I usually allow myself to enjoy these days It's 595 pages. Normally I go, you could've written this book in 395 pages and it would've been a better book. In this one, I feel that every one of those 595 pages was necessary and enjoyable.

John Maytham - Afternoon Drive presenter

Snow Country tells the story of Lena, a girl born in a small town in southern Austria in 1906 and Anton, a journalist eager to make a name for himself.

The pair meet at a sanatorium where they strike a connection.

He (Faulks) manages against that beautifully described grand canvas to locate tiny, minute, fascinating detail about how people live their lives. About how people think about themselves and about others.

John Maytham - Afternoon Drive presenter

_How to be a Refugee _is an account of how the author Simon May discovers his Jewish heritage which his mother and two aunts concealed in the late 1930's to escape from the Nazi's as they rose to power.

It's a fascinating and gripping account of how they lived their new identities and eradicated in themselves any trace of Jewish life.

He (Simon May) is someone who does not know what his identity is. And he wants to find his identity, so he pursues the story of his mother and two sisters to try and find some resolution about his own identity.

John Maytham - Afternoon Drive presenter

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